I read this book many years ago but as I received it as a gift from my younger child, it was time to read it again. Despite the seasoning of decades it holds up as a good book. Salt, which the author notes is "the only rock we eat," plays a vital role in human history and culture. At times this book reads like someone who knows a lot about salt and has decided to tell you all about it in detail, but in the most fascinating way possible. For foodies, Kurlansky also includes recipes using salt from across time and cultures.

There's way too much to summarize here, but my favorite part involves Avery Island in Lousiana. The island is actually a salt dome, and there's a curious connection between salt domes and petroleum. In the case of Avery Island, people have not only exploited it for salt and oil, but Edmund McIlhenny decided it would be a good place to grow peppers for use in his product, Tabasco sauce. The fun stories and historical connections make this book an informative and entertaining read. ( )

I definitely have mixed feelings about this one. The author has done an incredible amount of research and without a doubt makes his case for the importance of salt in world history, connecting it to lots of things we may have never thought of, and throwing in lots of interesting historical anecdotes. However, I could have done without the recipes. I did learn a lot however. The audiobook was generally well read except that the narrator doesn't know how to pronounce a lot of Chinese words, which I guess doesn't matter to most listeners who don't know how they are pronounced to begin with. ( )

ok, I probably found enough of it interesting for 200 pages, rather than the nearly 400 it is, but it was far more interesting then the topic would lead you to believe. ( )

Enjoyed it, a lot of tying history together and the start of bigger things - taxation, money, trade etc.. Easy to drop and pick up easily. Lots of recipes. ( )

Absolutely gorgeous and thought provoking book about humanity's relationship with the only rock we eat. From the very first handful of paragraphs, it's obvious the author has a keen interest in the subject, and a sharp sense of humour. Every chapter is mind blowing. Ancient and far reaching, the story of this ubiquitous compound that has changed lives around the dinner table and altered the path of empires is truly enlightening. Highly recommend it. ( )

I got this from Paul for Christmas a couple years ago. It is an excellent history of our world (albeit a mostly Western history) thru the manufacture, commerce and use of salt. It was a fascinating read. Never did I think a story about salt would have some surprising twists and turns, and surprisingly it did. A must read for any fan of the ubiquitous mineral.

Quotes:
A Breton expression was "Kement a zo fall, a gar ar sall", Everything that is not good asks to be salted. Everything from meat to butter to potatoes was salted. Salt was Brittany's cheapest product, the one everyone could afford. Another Breton proverb was "Aviz hag holen a roer d'an nep a c'houlenn" - Advice and salt are available to anyone who wants it.

By 1849, when Henry David Thoreau visited the Cape, he was already writing about saltworks being broken up and sold for lumber. Those boards, used to build storage sheds, were still leaching salt crystals 100 years later. ( )

An enjoyable and enlightening, but ultimately rather surface-y look at the history and impact of salt on civilization. I will admit that I never thought that much about boring old salt, and certainly never realized what a political and economic force the harvesting and control of salt has been across cultures over time. Kurlansky is a very readable writer and this book has more interesting factoids per page than almost anything I've ever read. That being said, the litany of facts and brief dips into cultures and time periods never lets an argument cohere and while it is fun to read in the moment, after I was done I felt like something was lacking. The scope of the book probably makes this kind of shallow but broad survey necessary, but I would have liked more connecting threads to pull the factoids together. Kurlansky also has a tendency to slide in personal commentary / snarky jokes here and there that read very awkwardly mixed in with the historic and scientific facts. If I could, I'd give it a 4.5 while reading it and a 3 after I was done and had some time to think about it. ( )

A big disappointment. I'd been really looking forward to this book and was pleased to find it at a neighbor's yard sale. It suffers from a weak structure, a lack of unifying themes or patterns, and despite the title, the absence of a world view. Where is South America, Central America, or Africa (apart from Egypt) in this discussion? Instead of relentless historical details about European salt production and use, I would have been much more interested in a look at how salt was produced and used across the globe at different points in time. ( )

This was an interesting microhistory as the use of salt is an integral part of the human experience. It is obvious the author spent a lot of time researching the history of salt, methods of production and all of its uses. Having said that, I found the writing to be way too detailed and unorganized, with some chapters going completely off topic. (Think of a textbook that hits the reader with so much minutia, that they probably will only absorb a tiny fraction of information.) I even considered not finishing, but instead skimmed a few chapters. ( )

So, I love microhistories. There's just something SO satisfying about learning a lot about the world by ostensibly learning about something small and contained. And Salt is basically the ur-microhistory -- one of the first and most famous books in the genre.

By my typical standards of microhistory, Salt is a win: every conversation I had while reading it eventually came around to me saying something like "so did you know that one of the major advantages of the North in the civil war is that they had more salt mines?" and (since I read it while in Austria) "did you know that they used to open salt mines to the general public as adventure rides?" And I did learn a lot about (broader) history through the infinity stories of "this area used to belong to tribe, but nation came and took it over because it had a good access to sea salt" but overall, I found the book boring. Not that the topic was boring, but, well Kurlansky's writing style was not ideal for me...he simply doesn't have any form of linking information. He'll state a sentence but not link it to related concepts in the chapter, or provide any sort of information about why that particular fact is interesting. If background information is needed for context he doesn't provide it. My own textbook writing is filled with linking phrases like "therefore, it follows that..." or "in light of this, it's particularly interesting that..." to keep the reader grounded in how things relate to each other. Also, each chapter contains recipes for no clear reason. Often the recipes use quantities that aren't defined anywhere and Kurlansky won't tell us what he intends the recipe to be an example of?

Kurlansky also perseverates on some topics: like salted fish. I think there were three chapters on salted fish, and yes, this is a microhistory, but there's really a limit of how much I want to know about salted fish.

But the content was excellent and I'm glad I read it. Just, next time, hopefully with any degree of structure ( )

Who would have thought that salt would be behind the rise and fall of empires, be the catalyst for discontent among various people leading to revolutions and wars. Kurlansky goes into how salt became a staple and in some places a currency. ( )

This book changed my life. I picked it up because fiction novels were all looking the same to me, and because it was thick enough to last the long train ride from Dusseldorf to Maastricht. School textbooks were the only non-fiction I'd ever read, and they had not prepared me for the vibrant and engaging writing found in Salt. Since reading this book I have become a devoted fan of non-fiction writing, which has exposed me to a whole new world of literature. ( )

Thorough and entertaining. As always I hope that some of the smaller, weirder tidbits stick in my head to form those wonderful lateral connections that come up when I learn something else new. (My favorite part though might be the reviewer who is convinced we can't get sodium from salt and the other who thinks it's a stretch to talk about Gandhi and salt. I don't often read the reviews, but when I do I find a lot of surprises!) ( )

"A Turks and Caicos designer drew a crest [for the flag] that included Salt Cay saltworks with salt rakers in the foreground and piles of salt. Back in England, it was the era of Arctic exporation, and, not knowing where the Turks and Caicos was, the English designer assumed the little white domes were igloos. And so he drew doors on each one. And this scene of salt piles with doors remained the official crest of the colony for almost 100 years, until replaced in 1968 by a crest featuring a flamingo." (Salt, 432)

This book is peppered (hah) with little anecdotal gems like this. The history of salt is indeed the history of so much more, as Kurlansky aptly demonstrates. Chapter 21, which details the significance of salt in Gandhi's resistance in India, was particularly interesting, as were the early chapters of the book. The book's biggest weakness is its organization, or lack thereof. In fairness, Kurlansky really didn't have that many options, given the topic. A straightforward chronological approach would not work, but the book does not negotiate the back and forth of the narrative as well as it might. I found myself losing track of the different methods, although I will admit this may be due in part to the large gaps of time in between my readings, which is obviously no fault of the book. It is certainly eye-opening in that we take for granted those little grains and what they mean for economics, for social justice, for history. A worthwhile read for anyone interested in world history and/or food. ( )

Some interesting stuff in here
But too much off-topic, digressions, and recipes (?!) meant I didn't get past the first couple of chapters ( )

Such a fascinating book. I learned so much. ( )

see Cod ( )

I think it's been about 15 years since I first read this book. I credit it as helping to fuel my love of science history.

Wars, roads, tariffs, taxes, sinkholes, food preservation, etc. Kurlansky covers all those and more.

Recommended to anyone. Easy-to-read regardless of background. ( )

http://pro-libertate.net/20160805/305-read-salt-world-history ( )

Fun book, well-written. A great way to learn about commerce and history from a particular perspective. Maybe a bit too long, but enjoyable. ( )

Salt. Everyone loves salt. Some people even crave salt. After reading Kurlansky's book on the subject I am better versed on all things salt. I am ready for a trivia game about salt. I now know salt is associated with fertility in some cultures and that Egyptians salted their mummies before burial. I know almost no geological area is without salt. Salt has been used as a currency. There is salt in gun powder. Salt is responsible for soy sauce's humble beginnings. The difference between creating alcohol and a pickle is salt. I never thought about how salt is the only rock people willing eat in great quantities or how every fluid in the body contains some percentage of salt. I could go on and on. Kurlansky takes his readers on a historical journey through epic wars like the American Revolution, the Civil War and beyond, all the while keeping salt as the main ingredient. You will never look at a shaker of salt the same way again. ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed this. It's a straight up history, and I found it not at all boring. On some level I knew salt was historically important, but that's about it. Its importance, it's perceived rarity, the lengths cultures would go to for salt - I had no idea. Needless to say, I learned a lot, and I liked it. So much so that I found myself listening to this outside my car trips as I did mundane tasks at work that didn't require my attention (cleaning tech). Included throughout the text are recipes - mostly historical, but even so, it makes me wish I had a printed copy of this book for my shelves.

The narrator, Scott Brick, gets a lot of credit for the rating. He did a fantastic job, reading this as if the thoughts were his own and you were in the midst of an enjoyable conversation. Very natural, and his voice extremely pleasant to listen to. ( )

I read Mark Kurlansky's Salt as a selection for the 2022 Nonfiction Reader Challenge. It is a history of the discovery, mining, sale and taxing of salt by cities and nations from 3600 BCE to the present. It is Kurlansky's 5th nonfiction book and here he explains how salt has shaped civilization from the its very beginning and how its story is an important part of the history of humans. For most of its history, salt has been used as a currency, influenced the establishment of European trade routes as well as cities, provoked wars between cities and inspired revolutions. Civilizations in China, Greece, Egypt and Rome all discovered salt on their own at about the same time. None of them can say that they discovered salt, although all of them make this claim. In each case, salt was discovered when lake and river waters evaporated in the sun. People harvested the square crystals on the surface of the water. Almost immediately it was used to preserve fish. As a necessary commodity for sustaining life, ancient politicians knew that they could make money by taxing the sale of salt. Cities that had saltmines made money from harvesting it while others that did not have this resource made money by regulating it. It is interesting that salt is a rock, the only rock that humans eat.

The book reads like a textbook, which in my mind is a negative. Almost every other sentence contains a new fact and made the book an overwhelming one to read. Kurlansky has found a salt connection nearly everywhere, especially in the modern era. The Erie Canal was built for the sake of salt, which needed to be moved from the upstate Onondaga region to New York City. The West Indian slave trade was primarily underwritten by sales of salt, even more than by molasses and rum. So how did salt encourage revolution? It was the salt tax in India that inspired Mohandas K. Gandhi to start a rebellion that led to independence. The American Revolutionary War as partly incited by salt shortages.

While it is pretty cool to amass these interesting facts about salt, the book itself is a hard and sometimes dull book to read. ( )

Ákaflega fróðleg og lifandi saga um efni sem mér datt ekki í hug að hefði ráðið jafn miklu og það gerði um gang sögunnar.
Saltið hefur verið efnahagsleg undirstaða stórvelda og gegnt undirstöðu hlutverki í matseld um allan heim. Mark Kurlansky fjallar á heillandi máta um áhrif salts í einstökum löndum og heimsálfum allt frá því fyrst er vitað af saltvinnslu til dagsins í dag. Hann gefur þætti þess í matargerð einnig góðar gætur í gegnum söguna og í bókinni má finna urmull uppskrifta af réttum og sérkennilegum matarhefðum í gegnum aldirnar. ( )

Pretty interesting history of salt, some recipes, some tangents about things going on in the world that were impacted by salt. ( )